Hey, it’s me, Alex! Do you ever feel like a guest writer on your own family’s blog? Back in the day I was the only one who wrote here. Anyway, it’s time to get you all caught up.

You can probably tell that we’ve been up to no good. As some of you might know, we’re expecting twins at the end of June! That has meant that life has been super crazy. One of these days we’re going to catch up on this blog. Here are some of the exciting posts that you can look forward to:

• We took out our sauna to make a spot for our family room!
• We had a fun trip in December to Denver to see Beth & Nathan
• We all went to Annah & Richie’s wedding in Spokane right after Christmas
• We found out we were having twins!
• Emmy plays basketball!
• Everyone gets sick! No, I mean everyone! (We’ll save you from an actual post on this one)
• Beth and her kids came to visit us in New Mexico! (see Beth’s blog post for some great pictures)
• Spring Break!

Anyway, life has been busy, but we would regret it if we let everything pass by without writing it down so we can remember it better. There’s lots of fun coming up, too!

Each year we try to guess who the winners of each college bowl, and here are our picks for 2010. Last year Bruce was our winner, but Kaylee is off to a strong start after picking the first three correctly! Good luck to everyone!

In addition to the leaderboard above, you can also see our actual picks.

Hey everyone!

I promise new pics of the girls are coming soon!  But I wanted to interject a little plug for my new blog here.  I’ve been wanting to start a new blog for a long time and finally got around to doing it.  While juliaandalex is mostly about my family, the new blog is going to be more about the things I am doing personally.  I hope to include recipes, book reviews, cake decorating, etc etc etc.

The new blog is http://neighborjulia.blogspot.com/ I decided to go with blogspot this time (even though Alex loves wordpress) because while juliaandalex is mostly for family and friends, I hope to get a larger following on neighborjulia.  So if you read it and like it please tell your friends and link to it! Or facebook about it or tweet or whatever it is you crazy kids do these days! 🙂

Hope to see you (and your comments) there!

Thanks,

Julia

Abigail was blessed on Aug. 1st, 2010.  We were so excited to be there for her big day!

Josh and Kaylee “help” get Abby ready!

Here is her pretty dress and bonnet!  What a sweetie!

I think this picture is so cute with her little tongue kind of sticking out!

Cheese!

We’ve added 3 grandkids since the last Baker family picture so it was great to have the whole clan together for a photo shoot!

Here’s a pic of Abby and some of the men that were in her blessing circle!  Both her Grandpas, her dad, and her uncle Alex!

And  finally the whole Given family!  Congratulations you guys!

One day while we were there we got to go to Cafe Rio and then to Tiny Town!  Both were great!  Here are some pictures from our trip to Tiny Town USA.

The covered wagon letting us know that we’ve arrived!

Logan looking on the roof of the general store!

They had little bench areas in between most of the buildings.  The benches were one of Emmy’s favorite parts!

Here come daddy and Emeline down main street!

Josh liked the barn dance!  Inside there were a bunch of barbie and kens dressed up like cowboys!

Kaylee takes a look in the flower shop!

Emmy peeking into the grand mansion of tiny town!

Told you the benches were Emmy’s favorite part!  She loves little chairs for her Kaylee.  Like when we go to Costco and they have little picnic tables set up that are her size she will sit there for hours!

The light house!  So interesting facts that I was reading about tiny town.  It actually opened in the early 1910s and was flooded like in the 50’s or something like that.  This lighthouse originally sat over the actual stream but I think was moved after the flood.

Alex is an opera star!

The airport!

Tiny town also has a train that circles around the park and lets you see some of the other houses that you can’t just walk up to.  The girls loved it!  (Alex just told me that right after our trip one of the trains actually derailed and some of the passenger got hurt!  Scary!)

Here’s a pic that Beth took of Emmy and her daddy on the train!